Keep Calm
by FuturePSotUS
Summary: Sherlock and John may deal with pain differently but they both still feel it. Also posted to AO3


The pain comes and goes in waves. It never seems to stop though since you don't realize when it's gone until after it's come back again. You learn to put up with it, to manage it, to work around it. It becomes a handicap the same as a bullet to the shoulder, although it has more in common with a psychosomatic limp.

But just like that limp (which you did get rid of) you do not let the pain, the agony, define you. You work twice as hard to find other nouns (soldier, doctor, lover, friend) and adjectives (friendly, caring, loyal, fierce) to define you, and for others to remember you by.

You fill your days, schedule all your time, and block something into every hour. If the minutes are full you cannot be empty, right? If there is always somewhere to go, someone to help, there is no room for pain. That's the theory anyway. In practice it doesn't work. The hours and even the minutes might be full but you can never account for all the seconds. A stray second here and there will slip by and the pain will take advantage of the opening and come in. Besides full is not fulfilling.

It won't go away, the pain. It won't fade and you don't become stronger because of it. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar. The pain just sits there. Occasionally, on a good day, when the sun shines or when you see children laughing on a playground, you'll forget it's there. You can pretend that you're cured and it's gone.

That only makes it worse when it comes back though. You've had a brief respite, a chance to remember what it was like before the pain. Your return to this new kind of normal is suffocating.

Still, you don't shut down. You don't lock yourself away. You get a real job (because you didn't need one, couldn't hold one down, before the pain). You go everyday and smile good morning and wave goodnight. You make polite conversation over coffee and lunch.  
You don't burden others with the pain. It wouldn't help you at all, so why bother?

Keep calm, soldier on.

* * *

There is no pain. Well no, there is pain and if unmanaged it would be overwhelming, it would take you over and control you the way the drugs did. That's too dangerous it cannot be allowed. So no, there is no pain. But no matter how you deny, it hovers in the periphery, you can see it out of the corner of your eye if you turn quickly. During the day, and actually during the night too (since really the difference between the two didn't matter much before, and even less now), you can keep it totally at bay.

Otherwise you must take the pain and fight with it, wrestle it down into submission, lock it away, make it earn the freedom it wants.

You have a mission, a duty (and how iconic to have a duty, not something you took stock in two years ago, it's everything now). You chose the pain to complete the mission. You knew all this feeling was going to be the result of that decision.

You had time to prepare for the pain, not much, but enough and you used it well. You rationalized the need for the pain, you strategized how to reach the end as fast as possible, you scratched out how the end would happen, the moment when the pain would disappear.

That thought motivates you, spurs you on, and keeps you going when the pain does break free. You don't make it your reason to continue though, that too much emotion and emotion is as dangerous as the pain. You continue because you have to, you started and you cannot stop until you're done. No other reason, no cause, no crusade, just the need to finish what you began.

The pain, the emotion, they provide you with the edge necessary to get it done. But you do not let them rule you. If you had your way there would be no pain, and very little emotion. But it seems these things are now firmly out of your hands. To ignore the pain, except for when it gets so bad you cannot, is your only viable option. You put your head down, melt into the shadows , do what you must to finish the job, and move on.

Keep calm, soldier on.


End file.
